GRASS VALLEY – Jerry Phillips took a bullet to his chest. Another slug went through his right leg. A third blew the watch off his left wrist.
This afternoon, someone will thank him for his sacrifice of more than six decades ago.
Retired U.S. Army Lt. Col. Henry Gerard "Jerry" Phillips will be awarded the Legion of Honor, France's highest honor, for his service in helping liberate that nation in World War II.
The invitation-only ceremony will add to the haul of medals the 86-year-old veteran received years ago for service on battlefields in North Africa, Sicily, France and Germany – two Silver Stars and three Purple Hearts.
It is a particularly important moment for the French government, which has been working for several years to track down American veterans who saw combat in France and helped free the nation from Nazi occupiers.
"France has given the award to about 700 U.S. veterans in the past 4 1/2 years," Jacques de Noray, deputy consul at the French Consulate in San Francisco, wrote last week in an e-mail. "We are still searching for veterans and still awarding the medal.
"We have to hurry as these veterans are getting old, since we owe them our freedom."
Despite the number of medals already awarded, Phillips had no idea he was entitled to one until he read a newspaper item about a golfer's hole-in-one.
The story was in the Wildwood Independent, a bimonthly newspaper in the area that Phillips helped start in 1980 and sold 10 years later.
As the former editor and publisher, he still gets a courtesy copy, and he was intrigued by the item he spotted two years ago.
The man in the story was a WWII vet. He'd served in Europe. In the 9th Infantry Division. In the 47th Infantry. In M Company.
In Phillips' unit.
Phillips didn't remember him from the war – the man had served in the unit for just three days before being wounded and shipped out. Still, he called and scheduled lunch.
The two were reminiscing when the other man pulled out a shoebox of war souvenirs that included the Legion of Honor medal and began talking about the French government's desire to honor such veterans.
Phillips filled out the paperwork and sent it off, and today French Consul General Pierre Mourier will induct him into the National Order of the Legion of Honor. The award was created in 1802 by Napoleon Bonaparte, and its eclectic collection of recipients includes Alexander Graham Bell, Gen. Omar Bradley and director Steven Spielberg.
Such a history is not lost on Phillips, who retired in 1967 after 30 years in the Army. He is the author of five books detailing histories of WWII battles and leaders, and the study of his Grass Valley home is filled with books about the war and its participants.
Phillips will be getting his medal because of a shootout at a French gas station that occurred after his unit landed in France on Utah Beach four days after the D-Day invasion on June 6, 1944.
By then he was a first lieutenant and a veteran of campaigns in North Africa (where shrapnel from a mortar blast penetrated the back of his helmet and lodged in his head) and Sicily.
In France, his unit had stopped near the town of Hirson and was waiting for a bridge that had been blown up to be rebuilt.
While they waited, Phillips' colonel got the notion that they should cross the stream and take a look at what the Germans might be up to in Hirson.
The colonel, Phillips and two other men headed off at dusk and found a hilltop chapel overlooking the town, where they hunkered down and watched. There was no sign of Germans, but they saw some civilians head into a building and light some candles, then heard them singing La Marseillaise, the French national anthem.
The colonel had an idea: "Phillips, you oughta go down and ask those French people having the party what happened to the Germans."
Phillips headed down the hill armed with his .45-caliber pistol and walked into a filling station with a solitary gas pump, the old hand-crank type with a glass bubble top.
"I looked down and I saw two figures laying on the ground and it looked to me like they had a BAR (a Browning automatic rifle)," Phillips said, and he figured they were fellow Americans.
"So I said, 'Hey,' and their heads came up and I could see the cutout of the helmets the Germans wore," he said.
They ran. He jumped behind the gas pump with his pistol in hand.
"So, I banged off three shots at these figures and all of a sudden there was a blast," he said. He'd been hit through the thigh by what he thought was an automatic pistol.
"I kept shooting and he kept shooting and his next blast took the wristwatch off my left wrist. The third blast he gave me plowed through the pump and hit me in the chest.
"I looked at my pistol and the slide was pulled back and I said, 'Oh, my God, out of bullets.' "
He took off, finding refuge with the colonel and the other men, who fought off some pursuing Germans. An American platoon later found three dead Germans at the gas station.
"I managed to get all of them," Phillips said.
Today, the young man known by his comrades as "Red" because of his flaming red hair has a thick shock of white hair. He and his wife, Lenore, who married him in 1942 just before he was shipped overseas, have two grown daughters.
They could be excused if they didn't care to relive the experiences of decades ago.
But Jerry Phillips hasn't forgotten.
Neither have the French.
Call The Bee's Sam Stanton, (916) 321-1091.
